In modern television or radio broadcast stations, compressed digital bit streams are typically used to carry video and/or audio data for transmission. For example, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standard for digital television (DTV) broadcasts in the United States adopted Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) standards (e.g., MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-3, MPEG-4, etc.) for carrying video content and Digital Audio Compression standards (e.g., AC-3, which is also known as Dolby Digital®) for carrying audio content (i.e., ATSC Standard: Digital Audio Compression (AC-3), Revision A, August 2001). The AC-3 compression standard is based on a perceptual digital audio coding technique that reduces the amount of data needed to reproduce the original audio signal while minimizing perceptible distortion. In particular, the AC-3 compression standard recognizes that at particular spectral frequencies the human ear is unable to perceive changes in spectral energy that are smaller than the masking energy at those spectral frequencies. The masking energy is a characteristic of an audio segment dependent on the tonality and noise-like characteristic of the audio segment. Different known psycho-acoustic models may be used to determine the masking energy at a particular spectral frequency. Further, the AC-3 compression standard provides a multi-channel digital audio format (e.g., a 5.1 channel format) for digital television (DTV), high definition television (HDTV), digital versatile discs (DVDs), digital cable, and satellite transmissions that enables the broadcast of special sound effects (e.g., surround sound).
Some broadcast scenarios call for an auxiliary audio service (AAS), such as an audio service containing voice-over material, to be mixed with a main audio service (MAS), which may correspond to the main television or radio program being broadcast. The AAS may originate either as live audio or may be stored in an analog, an uncompressed digital or a compressed digital format. Mixing of the AAS with the MAS usually includes attenuating the MAS and adding the AAS such that the AAS becomes audible while the MAS is still present at a low, but perceptible, level.
In traditional analog broadcasting, the mixing of two audio sources (e.g., the AAS and the MAS) is a relatively straightforward task involving well-known attenuation and amplification circuits. Similarly, the mixing of two uncompressed digital audio streams is also a relatively straightforward task because uncompressed digital samples can be mixed using known, linear attenuation and addition techniques. However, the mixing of two audio sources when either one or both of the audio sources provides compressed digital audio streams, as in the case of all-digital modern broadcast facilities, is significantly more complex. In some known systems, mixing of one or more compressed digital audio streams requires decompression of all the streams to be mixed. Mixing is then performed using the uncompressed data streams and then the resulting mixed data stream is recompressed. However, such approaches requiring decompression of the source digital streams and recompression of the mixed data stream are undesirable because recompression is an expensive operation that requires additional equipment, causes additional audio time delays, and increases the number of potential failure modes resulting from the numerous additional processing steps.